Complexity, Learning and Organizations

A Quantum Interpretation of Business

Walter R.J. Baets

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134177837
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This fascinating book argues for a new way of looking at the world and at human systems, companies or (Western) society as a whole. Walter R.J. Baets argues that we should let go of our drive to control, manage and organize, in order to be able to create an ideal environment for continuous learning, both for ourselves and for our collaborators.

Arguing in favour of a holistic management approach, and very much in opposition to the short-term shareholder value driven approaches that are popular today, Baets' book develops a logic founded in real life observations, examples and cases that every reader will recognize in their daily practice. It guides the reader to understand an alternative paradigm and allows them finally to be able to work with the dynamics of business on a daily basis.

A must-read for students of complexity, strategy and organizational behaviour, this well-researched, well-argued book skilfully guides the reader through this interesting subject.

1
We humans

During my years in the Netherlands I became acquainted with one of the events that is very dear to the Dutch: Queensday. It is indeed the commemoration of the Queen’s birthday (though in fact it is the Queen Mother’s birthday), and as such it is a bank holiday. In every town and village in the country, people sell whatever they want to sell on the streets; very often they sell their old stuff. Surprisingly, in the major towns (like Amsterdam and Utrecht) people sleep in the streets the night before, on the specific (strategic) spot where they want to sell their stuff, in order to make sure that they have that specific spot for their little shop. The phenomenon is called the ‘free market’. In a city like Amsterdam this is a huge scene of chaos, or should we say a perfect self-organization that, despite the presence of millions of people in town (many people come from all over the country to Amsterdam), passes more or less smoothly. But …

Queensday 2001. As in every other year, millions of visitors came to Amsterdam for the free market. As in every other year, most people came to Amsterdam by train, and, as usual, many additional trains were laid on. The increase of preventive alcohol testing seems to have had an unanticipated effect, in the form of a shift from private to public transport. Only in 2001 things went seriously wrong. All trains were stopped in the evening hours. The central railway station was closed down. Lots of people gathered in front of the railway station, some of them rather drunk. For the first time in Dutch history (the Dutch are known to be correct people) a real riot broke out. The newspaper headlines read ‘Civil war in Amsterdam’ or ‘Revolution’. In short, everything went seriously wrong.

The next day, everybody was looking for ‘things’ that went wrong, and especially for somebody to blame for this riot. And if one looks very hard, for sure one is going to find something (or someone). Don’t the French say ‘for a hammer, everything resembles a nail’? The trouble is that one never knows whether the people identified are indeed to blame for what happened, but in fact most often that is not the most important consideration. We have to find somebody who is guilty, or do we just look for a victim? Maybe we should beef up the procedures; that always sounds good. After all, if the procedures are clear-cut, they can easily cut wood, can’t they? Most medals, however, have a reverse side. In fact, I do not really think there are any medals with only one side, despite the fact that science is working very hard to find such kinds of medals.

Is it that the Dutch Railways (NS) is badly organized? Didn’t they have procedures for such cases? Weren’t the procedures put into effect with rigour? None of this has to be true. One can attempt to organize a system in all its details, but once humans are involved, mistakes are unavoidable. People are not machines. People make errors, they innovate, they experiment, they anticipate and they do a lot of other very positive things that a system can never anticipate. Systems are made for controllable, mechanistic applications, such as a watch. They operate in an ordered and organized way, at least if there are no outside forces to influence them (such as if you throw a watch on the ground). In other words, one can attempt to organize a human system, but there is no point hoping it will work. Somewhere, somebody will do something that has not been foreseen in the procedures, and that tiny different behaviour can eventually cause huge effects. That is what was seen on Queensday 2001. Can we find somebody who is to blame? Maybe. Can we anticipate this kind of event? No!

Another, more painful example in Dutch history is the explosion of a fireworks factory in the centre of Enschede (a medium-sized town in the east of the Netherlands). Despite the detailed rules about security in fireworks factories, a catastrophe could not be avoided. Should we refine the rules (even further)? Maybe. In the meantime, we invest a lot of money to find somebody who is guilty. But how come we learn so little from this kind of catastrophe? A comparable disaster had taken place roughly ten years earlier. Detailed suggestions were formulated and, to our surprise, they had not been put into effect. Is it that they were not applied, or didn’t they help? Or do we look through the wrong pair of glasses and consequently see the wrong things? Don’t be surprised that if you look at the world through a pair of rose-tinted glasses, the world will appear to be rose-coloured. The world is not really that colour, but for you it is, of course. And we are both right. For you the world is rose, but for everyone else it isn’t. It all depends on the pair of glasses you wear.

If we now introduce a somewhat more complex world and do not limit it to only one country, we see the most remarkable things. On 11 September 2001 two aeroplanes with passengers on board are flown into New York’s twin towers. Thousands of relatives of the victims of these (undoubted) terrorist activities cry out for justice. In fact, a nation should do everything in order to protect its citizens against this kind of terrorist attack. Let there be no doubt about this, and let us not ignore the fact that it will be a long and difficult road to follow. Thus far, everybody agrees. Then we start organizing. Being very organized, we are going to ‘seed’ actions, and what we get as a result is a lot of chaos and misery. Don’t we humans ever learn? What seems a long time for one person (a few weeks for Bush and his compatriots) seems very short for others. How is it possible, in such a short period of time, to find out what really happened, who was really behind it, and how we could prevent such events? But maybe we don’t need to; we could also ‘invent’ these details. Proof was not really necessary in this case (as it proved to be unnecessary in more recent dreadful cases). It was clear to everybody that bin Laden was guilty and no error could have been made. It was decided to follow a proven way of creating disaster: a regular war of an impressive media quality. Not surprisingly, we have harvested the well-known fruits from this tried and tested approach. A country was destroyed and many thousands of innocent people were killed. In the meantime, another country is added to the hit list. We have created yet another vacuum of power, we arm certain parties (and not others), and then we are surprised that the armed parties fill that vacuum, just as has happened many other times in history. Wasn’t it the United States that armed Saddam Hussein in order to fight Iran? Afterwards we are surprised when we get the very reaction we have provoked. Wasn’t it also the United States that armed and trained the bin Laden fraction in order to get the Russians out of Afghanistan? Wasn’t it Churchill who found it an interesting idea that the Russians and the Germans would kill each other on the Eastern Front in the Second World War? That would avoid the Allies having to take action. And suddenly we were again surprised that Stalin wanted to continue and ‘liberate’ Germany himself. Don’t we ever learn? If a journalist asks Madeleine Albright (ex-Secretary of State of the United States) whether she feels responsible for the millions of children dying as a result of the economic blockade of Iraq (before the recent war), she can only say that this is the price ‘we’ have to pay for the defence of democracy; collateral damage. Who is ‘we’?

Within a part of the world, or even within a country or a cultural community, we have co-created throughout history a pattern of values and norms that is based on different aspects of life. For convenience we refer to this as culture, science, or religion, each of which has many subordinate details. The prevailing culture, science and religion (or spirituality in a larger sense) has an important impact on people’s daily reality, even though often we are not really aware of this. These values are passed on very young via the family, and further developed during school life and the other contacts during our youth. For those who continue their education at university, strict rules are taught about how we should consider reality (in this part of the world). Imagine my surprise at finding a book titled The Islamic Approach to Doing Scientific Research. No doubt this will lead to Islamic findings. There seems to be one correct way of doing scientific research (in different parts of the world) that guarantees scientifically sound results. Our society is based on, and organized according to, generally accepted values – at least in what we call democratic countries. After years of being submerged in those values, it should not surprise us that many things are implicitly absorbed and transformed into our acts. We are not explicitly aware of these any more. Understanding (science), significance (spirituality) and design (art) are all important aspects of our behaviour.

What this book aims to do is to explore the split in the Western individual between, on the one hand, scientific thinking (understood as the positivist, reductionist scientific approach) and, on the other hand, the limited support that this approach gives for the necessary significance and design in human activities. If we were able to be aware of the underlying assumptions in our thinking, we might be able to deal better with issues of significance and design in an enriching and hence learning way. Eventually I would like to address in this book how to improve our learning capacity, as well as how to improve our capacity to create significance and art, all with the aim of enriching our actions. We explore how understanding (science) stands in the way of learning action. Who preaches order will spawn chaos (as the title of the Dutch edition of this book says). The more we organize things (by means of strict rules), the easier it becomes to ignore those rules. But worse, it is often sad to see how people became unable to deal with circumstances that are not described in rules. People seem to have lost their creative power. The means (the rules) become the target, and the real aim, to which the rules should contribute, becomes subordinate, or disappears completely. If we want to be able to learn, we should sacrifice blind rule-following.

When I was still living in Spain we flew back to the Netherlands for a few days. In Madrid (we lived in Granada) we had to transfer to a KLM flight to Amsterdam. My wife had an economy-class ticket (booked well in advance), but my own ticket (booked entirely too late) was a business-class ticket (there was no economy seat available). Fortunately it was being paid for by an assignment, but I wanted to fly with my wife. Since economy class was fully booked, I proposed to swap my ticket with any economy passenger (without a refund and without going through any other administrative procedure). The value added of this is clear: two happy people. I would be able to travel with my wife; the other passenger would suddenly get a business-class upgrade for free. However, this was impossible; it was against all rules. But since KLM is client-friendly they suggested waiting. Maybe a business-class seat would become available (the plane was fully booked; better times for the airlines) and then they could upgrade my wife. The rules did allow that. The proposal did not appeal to me, since it could always go wrong, whereas my proposal was simple and immediate. The story ends as might be expected. All the passengers showed up. One of us flew business, one economy. KLM had made two unhappy clients instead of three happy ones. The rules survived; my preference for KLM did not.

The underlying question of this book deals with my feeling about an ethical dilemma. Is the human still the centre of our action or are we rather trapped in the predominant power of the system? By system I do not only refer to a government, a state, a multinational company, as Marcuse suggested in the 1960s, or Orwell’s Big Brother, but very simply to any mechanistic procedure, on any possible level. Who preaches order will spawn chaos, and chaos does not necessarily need to be equal to a catastrophe. This book elaborates on the latent tension between the role and the power of the image, what we can call for simplicity an Eastern way of thinking, and the more rule-based and rational character of our Western society. People feel this tension, but there is not enough space in daily work and living conditions to deal with it differently. This creates a lot of tension in society, and especially on an individual level it creates frustration, stress and demotivation. If your boss, or your company, or the procedures have already decided everything for you, then there is little room for creativity. Fortunately, we have some ways out in our ‘free time’, at least in this part of the world.

The aim of this book is not to achieve scientific correctness as it is understood in this part of the world. I would prefer to share some insights and experiences with readers able to learn from it. A scientifically correct book would contain more references than is desirable, which would guarantee that everybody would accept it, and there would most likely be little criticism of it. But why would you read such a book, if it only repeats what others have already written? Maybe I should label this book as one that attempts to give insight into what is scientific in the first place. There will not be many references to other books (other than for intellectual respect). I will, however, suggest some further reading for the interested reader. The book is discovering, exploratory, with the aim that readers can themselves make sense out of it and identify what is important. Maybe I shall sometimes allow myself some ‘poetic licence’. I do use some allegories and symbolic stories. Often I use metaphors in the form of pictures and stories instead of observable facts. My aim in doing so is to write a readable book, usable by everybody who wants to learn and who wants to understand why they feel the tension I mentioned. We talk about a gap between rationality and control on the one hand, and creativity and development on the other hand.

Though this book addresses the learning human, rather more attention is given to the learning manager and the learning teacher and/or researcher. In English at least, we correctly use the term ‘teacher’ for somebody who attempts to teach. In other languages this is sometimes different. In my native language (Dutch) the word leraar is used (this would probably correctly translate as ‘the one who allows learning’), in order to refer to somebody who in fact teaches. The correct word, which does not in fact exist, is ‘onderwijzer’ (this literally means teacher). Anyway, and in practice, in many languages we often do not correctly distinguish between teaching and learning and related words. We will discuss this later in detail, while talking about knowledge and learning. For the manager (and more generally for anybody who holds a position of responsibility in our society), this book aims to illustrate why we always reinvent the wheel, why we are so keen on power (and control, or should it be the other way round?) and why it is so difficult to share. The rational, control-oriented character of our society gives us the perfect context (and excuse). For the researcher, this book seeks to give insight into why there is so little breakthrough research going on these days. If one searches where others already searched (the word is ‘re’-search, isn’t it?), one should not be surprised to find what others already found. If one would like to find something new, one should search either in a different direction, or with a different pair of glasses. The word ‘research’ (searching for what has already been searched for) suggests continuing to search in already known directions. In order to allow the reader to acquire the necessary insight (which is the only ground for possible change), some attention is given in the book to both traditional philosophy of science and somewhat more innovative trends. The reason for this is not that this book aims to address that issue, but rather because our epistemological choices are very often the cause for most of what we do and believe on a daily basis. If we aim to better understand the daily practice of ‘taking responsibility’ (what I will translate further as management), or if we want to understand why science often confirms what we already (commonly) know, we have to pay attention to questions of significance (truth, knowledge, etc.).

We already touched brie...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• About the author
• Preface
• 1 We humans
• 2 Paradigms, truth and postmodernism
• 3 The underlying theory: a new paradigm
• 4 Gödel for beginners: the concept of self-reference
• 5 Knowledge and learning
• 6 The learning manager
• 7 Does our society ever learn?
• 8 The quantum interpretation
• 9 Quantum economics, or the quantum interpretation of management
• 10 Let us start learning now: what can you do yourself?
• 11 Epilogue: some poems of Erna Oldenboom
• Bibliography
• Index